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Q&A What are the Pros and Cons of long names?

When you talk about the "translation", do you mean that you are writing your book in some language other than English and you are translating between English and your native language to ask this qu...

posted 6y ago by Jay‭  ·  last activity 4y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T08:55:29Z (over 4 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/36425
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Jay‭ · 2019-12-08T08:55:29Z (over 4 years ago)
When you talk about the "translation", do you mean that you are writing your book in some language other than English and you are translating between English and your native language to ask this question? Or do you mean that you have a made-up language in your book, and these names are in this made-up language?

If we're talking about your native language, as @galastel says, some languages are more tolerant of long words. I'm no linguist, but I understand that, for example, German and Innuit combine short words and standard prefixes and suffixes to make long words. But to native speakers, the word isn't hard to understand because they recognize the pieces. So if you're creating a name in some other language that, to native speakers of that language, will not seem particularly long or cumbersome, than no problem.

But if this is a made-up language ... you have a big problem. Readers are going to have a very hard time hacking through that name. If you have multiple long names like this, readers are going to start getting confused between Foobacktrannorthramnewup and Foobackgranramnorthwup or whatever.

I'm hard pressed to think of any advantage. Maybe you could say it gives the story some distinctive flavor. If you talk about the language a lot in the story, some readers may find it interesting to examine how the language works. (Many Star Trek fans are apparently fascinated by their made-up Klingon language.)

Unless there is a really compelling reason why you need these 15 syllable names for the story to work, I'd vote strongly no.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2018-05-25T03:06:50Z (almost 6 years ago)
Original score: 4